Coaching Agile Teams - Lyssa Adkins

CoLab Book Club - July 2026

Our July #CoLabBookClub pick took us back to something of a classic: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins. First published in 2010, the group still rated it as compulsory reading for aspiring coaches. The conversation ranged widely from coaching stances to whether AI is quietly eroding our specialist skills, with plenty of good thinking along the way.

Lyssa herself is a popular visitor to NZ - several of us have really enjoyed meeting her and hearing her speak in person over the years.

Overview

Adkins draws on her own shift from command-and-control project management into agile coaching, and the book maps out the different "hats" a coach wears: teacher, mentor, facilitator, problem solver, conflict navigator and performance coach. The core message is that coaching isn't about producing answers, it's about resisting the urge to solve things for the team so they can build their own capability. Adkins also gets refreshingly honest about failure, naming common traps like becoming "the Expert" or "the Hub," and pairing each with a healthier alternative to grow into.

Our Key Takeaways

✔️ "Take it to the team" - solving problems for people, even with good intentions, breeds learned helplessness.
✔️ Learning to "sit on your hands" is the hardest shift for anyone coming from a project management background.
✔️ Knowing which hat to wear (teaching, mentoring, coaching or facilitating) and when is a skill in itself.
✔️ Coaching value is notoriously hard to quantify, it often only becomes visible once the coach has moved on.
✔️ Conflict isn't a red flag. The book suggests anchoring the team to a shared goal first, then working through relationships.
✔️ Coaching works best when it reaches upward too, bringing leaders and product owners along on the shift toward servant leadership rather than just working at team level.

Who is it For?

It's a strong read for new Scrum Masters and agile coaches, though we noted the "hands-off" style can be interpreted differently depending on how structured or hierarchical an organisation is. We'd pair it with something more metrics and business-value focused, since the book itself doesn't pin down a clear definition of "performance."

Thank you!

Thank you Lyssa Adkins for a book that, fifteen years on, still gives coaches language and permission to trust the team.

Thanks to this month's #CoLabBookClub crew - Ceedee Doyle, Elisabeth Stiller, John R. Allen, Kat Debney (host!), Paul Salmon, Pete Tansey (agilePete), Peter Bink and Toni Wilson. Great conversation team!

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